Section 3

3. What, then, can this be, this something in virtue of which we
declare the entire divine Realm to be Eternal, everlasting? We must
come to some understanding of this perpetuity with which Eternity is
either identical or in conformity.

It must at once, be at once something in the nature of unity and
yet a notion compact of diversity, or a Kind, a Nature, that waits
upon the Existents of that Other World, either associated
with them or
known in and upon them, they collectively being this Nature which,
with all its unity, is yet diverse in power and essence. Considering
this multifarious power, we declare it to be Essence in its relation
to this sphere which is substratum or underlie to it; where we see
life we think of it as Movement; where all is unvaried self-identity
we call it Repose; and we know it as, at once, Difference
and Identity
when we recognize that all is unity with variety.

Then we reconstruct; we sum all into a collected unity once
more, a sole Life in the Supreme; we concentrate Diversity
and all the
endless production of act: thus we know Identity, a concept or,
rather, a Life never varying, not becoming what previously
it was not,
the thing immutably itself, broken by no interval; and knowing this,
we know Eternity.

We know it as a Life changelessly motionless and ever holding
the Universal content [time, space, and phenomena] in actual
presence;
not this now and now that other, but always all; not existing now in
one mode and now in another, but a consummation without part or
interval. All its content is in immediate concentration as at one
point; nothing in it ever knows development: all remains identical
within itself, knowing nothing of change, for ever in a Now since
nothing of it has passed away or will come into being, but what it
is now, that it is ever.

Eternity, therefore- while not the Substratum [not the essential
foundation of the Divine or Intellectual Principle]- may be
considered
as the radiation of this Substratum: it exists as the announcement
of the Identity in the Divine, of that state- of being thus and not
otherwise- which characterizes what has no futurity but eternally is.

What future, in fact, could bring to that Being anything which
it now does not possess; and could it come to be anything which it
is not once for all?

There exists no source or ground from which anything could make
its way into that standing present; any imagined entrant
will prove to
be not alien but already integral. And as it can never come to be
anything at present outside it, so, necessarily, it cannot
include any
past; what can there be that once was in it and now is gone?
Futurity,
similarly, is banned; nothing could be yet to come to it. Thus no
ground is left for its existence but that it be what it is.

That which neither has been nor will be, but simply possesses
being; that which enjoys stable existence as neither in process of
change nor having ever changed- that is Eternity. Thus we come to
the definition: the Life- instantaneously entire, complete, at no
point broken into period or part- which belongs to the Authentic
Existent by its very existence, this is the thing we were
probing for-
this is Eternity.